


I Want a President

by Rosa52



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-23
Updated: 2017-01-23
Packaged: 2018-09-19 09:38:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9433286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rosa52/pseuds/Rosa52
Summary: The format of this is a lot like my previous story, Neruda - it centers around a poem (Zoe Leonard's "I Want a President"), and is mostly just character introspection and fluff. It might be a little angstier than Neruda was.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The poem that this fic is centered around - "I Want a President" by Zoe Leonard - uses some slurs and hits some hard topics (rape, AIDS, abortion, police violence, drug abuse, sexual harassment, discrimination). Please don't be taken by surprise.

I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to AIDS, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air conditioning, a president who has stood in line at the clinic, at the DMV, at the welfare office, and has been unemployed and laid off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth, someone who has eaten hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker. Always a liar, always a thief, and never caught.

\- Zoe Leonard

Less than a week into her position with the Bartlet campaign, she’d rolled her eyes when she got the envelope. Sneered a little – at the idealism, the arrogance, the willful naïveté, but it had been from Vida, so she’d kept it. A poem, ripped roughly from a magazine, presented without comment – how _Vida_ of her, not even a note, not a fucking “congratulations on the new job.” Not even an “or else.” CJ had known what to expect the minute she’d seen the envelope, though; she’d once been so deeply immersed in Vida’s thoughts, Vida’s heart that even all these years later, having lost that fluency, CJ was still conversationally proficient in Vida’s emotions. The envelope had been full of frustration and who the fuck do you think you are and who are you becoming and you’ve changed (have you really changed _that much_?) and you are enough a part of me that I keep tabs anyway. When she’d read the poem, it raised an echo of the version of her that would have heard the words spill, recited, from Vida’s lips as they walked down Telegraph Avenue, laying claim to the pavement with each step, setting it free with the next. The CJ who would have felt those words twine around her spine and burn themselves in, indelible, had sounded in her head. She’d snapped back at the shadow of her youth – she’d _grown up._ And _fine,_ maybe Bartlet wasn’t much different in circumstance from the men who’d come before him, but he had substance. Bartlet was a _good man._ And a good man might not _get it –_ not _really_ , not in the raw, personal way Vida demanded, but a good man in power, committed to using that power to do good, could make a difference without cracking the institutions of the American state like a chrysalis. Vida wanted revolution; hell, Vida _was_ revolution. CJ wanted progress. Vida was a firecracker, all heat and light and force; CJ, somehow, had grown into some hybrid of a midwife and a crossing guard, shepherding plans and ideas and threats into the world.

She kept the envelope and the poem in her suitcase on the campaign until she didn’t. She never _intended_ to get rid of them – she had some idea of keeping the paper husk of her revolutionary self in her desk as a reminder, especially if (against all odds) they made it to the White House. But then she went full Berkeley on Josh at some divey bar in Wyoming and spent the rest of the week being alternately teased and cajoled into easing up – just a little – on some of her more hard-line stances. _Learn how to compromise_ , Toby had said, only a little bitterly; _learn to appreciate incremental change. The things that last are built slowly._ When they cleared out of the Wyoming hotel, she left the poem behind. The envelope she kept, savoring the spiky scrawl of Vida’s handwriting. It made it as far as the Democratic Convention. Bartlet accepted the nomination, and that night, as the campaign staff celebrated, there was a warning issued (mostly to Josh, who was indiscreetly trashed after not much champagne and too much Mandy), half-heartedly disguised as a joke: in the morning, all the never-have-I-ever shit they’d been up to – hell, any of the stunts they’d ever pulled – had to stop. Indiscretions were career-enders now, and not just for them. CJ stared into her whiskey, seeing the honey-gold stretch of Vida’s skin, remembering the feel of Vida’s shoulder under her lips. Her mind had raced – head against gut; it was over, long over, for both of them, and no one would care – having a college girlfriend who sometimes sent postcards wasn’t much of a scandal by anyone’s standards. _Career ender, my ass_ , she thought with half-drunk bravado, but the sober half of her saw the other, harsher side: this career was a Vida-ender. There was no room for a flame of a person in such a careful life. When she made her unsteady way back to her room that night, she tore up the envelope. When the next one arrived, months later, in the home stretch of the campaign, she returned it unopened.

She wouldn’t be thinking about this at all, on any normal day. It had been a long time since she’d started seeing Danny’s red-gold hair, rather than Vida’s skin, in the color of her whiskey, started hearing his voice, not Vida’s, pushing her on the hard issues. But this was so far from a normal day that there weren’t really words for it, and it wasn’t really about Vida, anyway – it was about herself, about the kind of person she’d made herself, the kind of person Vida had never wanted her to be. Multiple sclerosis, Bartlet had _fucking multiple sclerosis_ , and he’d had it all along. Her first wave of emotion had been fear – fear _for_ him, because she loved him, because she believed in him. Was he in pain? Was he dying? The next wave had come quickly, though; betrayal and rage and self-disgust had all washed over her together and had yet to subside. He had multiple sclerosis, _he’d had it all along,_ he’d said _nothing._ And had she known? Had she _really_ known? Shouldn’t she have? What had she ignored in the interest of getting a _good man_ into office? Had she made a career of looking the other way just to put power into the hands of a man who would rather endanger the country than give up his chance of being _right?_  It was in that moment that she remembered Vida’s letter – the last one she’d opened. She felt a sudden need for that poem, a need to salt the would she’d helped inflict on herself. Her hands shook on the keyboard as she searched for it, shook harder when she found it. It felt hollow reading it on a screen; but then, everything was hollow now. It was only fitting that this would be no exception. She read the words with knife-edged intensity. _Always a liar,_ she thought bitterly, her mind tracing each point of the campaign (did I know then? Should I have?); _always a thief, and never caught._

It was close to 8 PM when Josh got out of his meeting. It would have made more sense to go straight home from the Hill, but there was work to be done. Probably. Maybe. Donna would know if there was work to be done, and since Donna didn’t work at his apartment, he had to come back to the White House to make sure the day was done. Or something. _Shit_ , he though to himself as he traced his thought process back. _Donna was never going to buy that._ When she asked why he was back – and she would – he was going to need a better answer than “I wish you worked in my apartment.” _Shit. Shitshitshit._ Maybe if she thought he _thought_ he had a meeting? But then she’d just think he didn’t listen, and she’d tell him how he didn’t listen, and it would still be nice, because it was Donna, but not as nice as it _could be._ He was walking into the West Wing when inspiration struck: a question. He would have a question after the meeting and need to talk to another West Wing staffer, and then he would just _happen_ to be there to talk to Donna at the end of the day. Toby would _actually_ ask him about the meeting, and Sam would start the kind of conversation that neither of them could back away from, and he didn’t want either of those things tonight. CJ would see right through him, but she wouldn’t _mind_ – hell, she might not even be there. She might be home, taking a well-deserved rest, or reading her secret anthology of Danny Concannon's columns. It was perfect. Jubilant, he headed for CJ’s office. Carol was away, her desk dark, but a light shone from the doorway, CJ's profile clearly intent on something on her computer. He stepped in, a playful “Whatcha reading?” rolling off his tongue even as he recognized his mistake. Her eyes were banked coals; the smile she shot him was the kind that masks a mouth full of blood. CJ had always had a prizefighter’s posture, but tonight, the set of her shoulders said sucker punch, and he found himself scanning her face, her desk, his memory for anything that could have put that sort of sharp-edged, shatter-ready tension in her spine. “Funny you should ask,” she murmured, and he couldn’t quite remember what he’d asked, or why he’d asked it. Her lips formed around the words, half blessing, half curse: “Zoe Leonard.”

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Even in the moment when he revealed his lie, CJ knew she still loved the President. She knew he was still a good man. She knew she wished him well, wanted him happy, admired his mind. It took time for her to start believing again, though. Believing in anything, really, but especially in Bartlet. Eventually, she was able to acknowledge that she was proud of what they'd accomplished. A few weeks after that, she could say she was proud of  _him_ \- as a person, as a leader, as man with flaws as deep as anyone's. From there, she was able to look at his legacy - what it was and what it wasn't; she was able to acknowledge that there was no one she trusted to protect and further that legacy more than Bartlet himself. She could say she was glad he was running again - that she was honored to continue to work with him - and almost mean it. After the election, she could say she was proud he won with the whole truth known, and while the unsaid  _this time_ lay heavy in her throat, she didn't have to lie at all. The wound healed, but the scar stayed; years later, as the clock ran out on her last few days as Chief of Staff, each time someone asked her what she wanted for the future, an echo of herself sounded louder in her mind, " _I want a dyke for president."_

 

 


End file.
